The committee of legislators obtained information that indicated that since January 2012, 21 of 26 requests for Freedom of Information Act fee waivers from conservative groups were denied. During the same period 75 of 82 FOIA fee waiver requests from environmental groups that shared many of the same agendas of the current administration were approved.

The evidence is overwhelming that these supposedly “public” bureaucracies do not think of themselves as equally serving all Americans. They want to smack down some Americans and help others in every way they can get away with. I would be fine with this if the EPA only collected taxes from their groupies, but that is never an option, sadly.

And it looks like, thus far, others in government are going to let them get away with it.

A recent EPA IG report claimed there was “no indications of bias” in the agency’s Freedom of Information Act to grant or deny fee waiver requests to conservative groups. The investigation was launched by the EPA after conservative groups and several states accused the agency of stonewalling FOIA fee waiver requests to prevent politically unfavorable information from becoming public.

But the conservative watchdog group Energy & Environment Legal Institute (EELI) said that the EPA IG report was designed to avoid examining the actual evidence of EPA wrongdoing.

“In short, after EPA’s bias was exposed and subjected to scrutiny, the Agency tread water until the threat passed; then it came back against these groups more aggressively than ever,” EELI wrote in a report rebutting the EPA IG’s findings. “Then, OIG designed its inquiry in a way that ensures the threat had passed, leaving it once again covering for EPA transparency abuses violating several federal laws.”